Wednesday, 12 November 2014

FIRST OF THE LITTLE FELLERS - NORTH KOREA ON TEESSIDE

I posted this a month or so ago, then cunningly
contrived to delete it. So let’s pretend it’s a coda to the World Cup pieces.

This piece originally appeared in When Saturday Comes in October 2002. A week later I was at the Riverside for the Leeds game. The
reception the North Korean players got from the crowd was warm and genuinely
touching. Pak Do-Ik even recreated his goal in front of the North Stand.

The Game of Their Lives is a wonderful film that
deserves wider distribution. If you get a chance to see it, then you should.

On Friday October 25 a worker from a North Korean
textbook factory will return to the scene of his greatest triumph. Pak Do Ik
has not been back to Middlesbrough since his goal set up what remains arguably
the greatest shock in World Cup history, his country’s 1-0 win over Italy in
1966.

Ayresome Park is now a housing estate. A communal garden stands on the Hol­gate
End, where support for the North Korean out­siders was so vociferous it fused
the press-box lights (“They’ve never cheered Middlesbrough like this for
years,” bellowed BBC commentator Frank Bough who’d worked at ICI Billingham and
played a couple of games for Synthonia). The area to the left
of what was once the Holgate End penalty spot is somebody’s front lawn. But if
you look very carefully you will see in among the neatly clipped grass the
bronze cast of the imprint of a football boot – a sculpture by the artist
Neville Gabie – that marks the spot from which North Korea’s No 7 struck his
shot.

Pak Do Ik, along with the six other surviving mem­bers
of that North Korea team, are coming to England for the first time since
Eusebio’s barnstorming display at Goodison Park in the quarter-final removed
them from the tournament. Daniel Gordon and Nicholas Bonner have spent the past
five years making a wonderfully entertaining and moving documentary, The
Game Of Their Lives, which tells the story of the North Korea team at the
World Cup. They are the first West­erners to have been given permission to meet
and film the players who caused such a sensation 36 years ago and then,
apparently, disappeared without trace.

David Lacey, Bernard Gent and a clutch of the Mid­dlesbrough fans who idolised
them also contribute, as do a couple of the vanquished Italians. Gianni Rivera,
looking like Marcello Mastroianni's more successful elder brother, is still pleasingly
grumpy about the whole business, dis­dainfully dismissing the North Koreans as
an in­ferior team, though his former team-mate Sandro Mazzola is altogether
more engaging, merrily chuckling as he recalls the Italians’ arrival back home
to a hail of rotten fruit: “I didn’t get hit by anything. I was quick in those
days!”

The film effectively juxtaposes archive commentary from the BBC and previously
unseen footage shot by the North Korean documentary crew that accompanied the
team throughout the World Cup, with film shot in the People’s Democratic
Republic over the past few years. The latter varies from the spectacular, to
the grim, to the downright eerie. Anyone who wonders what a team from east Asia
would make of training at Central Avenue, Billingham should take a look at the
playing surface of the pitch at the Ryongsong Cigarette Factory, a corrugated
mud-patch on which we see The Tobacconists doing battle with The Paper Rollers
under the watchful if slightly rheumy eye of Pak Do Ik’s old col­league, Yang
Song Guk.

Most of the spookiness comes courtesy of Kim Il Sung, The Great Leader – a man
so revered in North Korea that he remains head of state despite having been
dead for eight years. At one point in the film the players in their medal-be­decked
baggy suits and over-sized military uniforms gather in the shadow of an en­ormous
statue of Kim Il Sung and recall their meeting with him before they left for
England. Suddenly one of them, the half-back Rim Jung Song, blurts out “I wish
he was still alive!” and bursts into tears, sending several other team members
into convulsive sobs. It is a mom­ent at once touch­ing and yet unnerving, like
watching an elderly German weeping over his fallen comrades.

Kim Il Sung loomed large in thoughts of the players throughout the World Cup.
Recalling a period of self-doubt before the qualifying game against Australia,
centre-half Rim Jung Song says: “Then I remembered what The Great Leader had
said to us, ‘In order to be a good footballer you must run swiftly and pass the
ball accurately.’” This suggests that had the bottom ever fallen out of the
dictatorship market The Great Leader could have found gainful employment as an Asian
Trev­or Brooking, yet such is the belief in his wisdom among North Koreans that
this bland comment was enough to re-fire Rim Jung Song’s belief in himself. The
team thrashed Australia 9-2 on aggregate.

Those games highlighted some of the problems surrounding the North Korean team.
Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, the north had been com­pletely
isolated. Since Australia and North Korea did not officially recognise each
other, both games were played in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh.

Similar troubles attended the trip to Britain. The foreign office thought of
refusing visas, but that might have lead FIFA to move the World Cup, so instead
they came up with a series of diplomatic compromises. The team would be called
“North Kor­ea”, never the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; the flag could
be flown, but na­tional anthems would be played only before the first match and
the final – neither of which was expected to involve Pak Do Ik and his fellows.

And so the North Koreans arrived at London Airport and then trundled northwards
on Bri­tish Rail singing their patriotic songs (“Carrying the nation’s honour
on our shoulders” runs one) and signing autographs for ladies with beehive
hair-dos and bird-wing spectacles. In Middlesbrough, the mayor, mindful of the
fact that many locals might be mistrustful of the visitors with whom this
country had so recently been at war (“We were the en­emy,” Pak Do Ik observes
candidly) made a whole-heart­ed effort to ensure the North Kor­eans were given
a warm welcome. It succeeded beyond all hopes. “It remains a riddle to me,”
says Rim Jung Song. “The people of Middlesbrough supported us all the way
through – I still don’t know why.”

One Boro fan who watched the games offers an ex­planation: “They were small for
a start, which was a novelty. They were like a team of jockeys. But they mov­ed
the ball around. They played good football.” The size thing (the average height
of the team was just 5ft 5in) was indeed a factor. In their first game against
the Soviet Union the North Koreans were knock­ed flying by their much larger
opponents who, to use a technical term, kicked the shit out of them. As David
Lacey says, it was the sight of small men being bullied that really awakened
the sympathy of the crowd.

After that, North Korea became the home side at Ayre­some Park and 3,000
people travelled from Teesside to Liverpool to watch them take on Portugal,
where they amazingly took a 3-0 lead after 24 minutes, only to succumb 5-3
thanks to the brilliance of Eusebio. “His shooting was so accurate and so
powerful. I was just not good enough to save it,” recalls the goal­keeper Ri
Chan Myong, with an honesty some Premiership net-minders might learn from.

In the end, though, the result was hardly the point: “The English people took
us to their hearts and vice versa,” says Pak Do Ik. “I learned that football is
not about winning. Wherever we go… playing football can improve diplomatic
relations and promote peace.” The North Koreans’ trip back to England this
autumn should prove his point.

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About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.